By Sophie Sloan

Sloan and her students at Manchester High School graduation.

Some people dream about their careers from an early age, while others just kind of stumble into them. My mom Pamela Sloan was always meant to be in the food world, but she didn’t expect to end up teaching. However, if you ask her now, after 24 years of running Manchester High School’s Culinary Arts Program, she’ll tell you it was the best thing that ever happened to her.

Her love for cooking came from her own mom, Marie Helene, who spent years living in France and passed down her appreciation for food. Sloan strengthened her cooking skills as she started cooking for herself and her siblings at a young age. Reminiscing this time, Sloan says, “I would come home from school every day and make dinner for my brother and sister.” Instead of bedtime stories, my mom read cookbooks. Like, for fun. She would ride her bike to the local library in Pasadena, Maryland, where she grew up, just to check out cookbooks. She would even leave hanging out with her friends early to watch The French Chef with Julia Child. Sloan described how she would flip through the television channels and how “nothing was more interesting than the cooking shows.” By age 12, she was already working in a friend’s dad’s restaurant, The Sunshine Grill, in Pasadena. 

Sloan and students outside of the culinary building at Manchester High School.

From then on, she worked in many kitchens and restaurants, including bakeries, fine dining spots, dive bars, and country clubs. She even studied at the Culinary Institute of America in New York and did a study-abroad program on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. After graduating from the CIA, she became a sous chef at the Maryland Club in Baltimore, then took over a catering company in Baltimore at just 23 years old. In 2000, she moved to Virginia, looking for a fresh start.

She didn’t exactly love what she found. 25 years ago, Richmond’s food scene was not thriving like it is now. “It was like something out of 1981,” she said. She was used to high-end kitchens, where chefs worked directly with farmers and fresh seafood suppliers. Here, everything here felt outdated. At one particular fine-dining establishment, when cutting vegetables on a cutting board, roaches began crawling over it while she was using it. After telling her manager, he replied, “They don’t eat much.” This is when she knew that was the end of that job. 

Sloan’s students making macarons.

She called her old chef from the Maryland Club and said, “Give me the best restaurant job in Richmond.” After this call, she landed at the now-closed The Frog and The Redneck, a bistro in Shockoe Slip, with chef Jimmy Sneed, but he didn’t have enough hours for her. So, she began working at the Country Club of Virginia during the day and The Frog and The Redneck at night, just trying to make it all work.

Eventually, CCV’s executive chef asked if she wanted to come be the chef of his catering company. She said yes, quit both jobs, and suddenly had a team of eight people working for her. She even signed up for an education class offered by Chesterfield County to learn payroll software, thinking it might help her run the business better. 

That’s when everything changed. 

When she went to sign up, a man approached her. Since she was wearing her chef’s coat, she figured he would ask her for a recipe, because she says “people always do that.” Instead, he asked if she was a chef. She said yes, and unexpectedly, he said, “Would you ever think about being a teacher?” Her first reaction? “If you knew me, you wouldn’t have asked that.”

Sloan’s culinary students with food they just made.

The man was the principal of Manchester High School at the time, and he was starting a culinary program and wanted someone with real industry experience. She thought about it and took the job, never looking back. Now, 24 years later, she has built the program into an educational experience that is about so much more than just learning to cook. Many of her students do not come from homes where people cook, so she focuses on food literacy and understanding where food comes from, how it’s made, and why it matters. She takes her classes on field trips to meet farmers, fish suppliers, and local chefs. She wants her students to feel comfortable in the kitchen, no matter where they came from. 

“I try to be the teacher I wish I had in high school,” she says.

Richmond’s food scene has changed immensely since Sloan first arrived, but one thing that hasn’t changed is Sloan’s passion for making food accessible for everyone. She might not have planned on becoming a teacher, but sometimes, the best things in life are the ones you never saw coming.

All photos courtesy of Pam Sloan.